Opening My Eyes Underwater by Ashley Woodfolk

Author:Ashley Woodfolk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

One of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite.

—MICHELLE OBAMA, Becoming

When I was thirty, married to the man of my dreams, a few years into my career as a marketing professional, and shortly after selling my first novel, I came out as queer to my husband. I remember staring at these dried flowers from our wedding as I told him, thinking about how they’d bloomed and how they’d be exactly as they were now, forever. I remember wishing I could be that way—frozen at my most beautiful, instead of being this finicky, always changing, sometimes ugly (and always confusing) human thing. It was not graceful or neat, my confession. I cried a lot. We had a bumpy couple of months, but we made it to the other side.

I start this essay in this way because we are conditioned to believe that by the time we are of a certain age or in a certain place in our careers or once our personal lives reach or pass particular milestones, we are in some way “complete.” Making the opposite also true, right? That if we haven’t done certain things by a certain age, we’re incomplete. Both these things are dead wrong. And I have a theory that it all starts with asking kids this pointless question.

As a kid, Michelle and her parents spoke often about the kind of future she wanted for herself. Inspired by her own mother’s diligence when it came to her and her brother, she’d imagined becoming a mother from a very young age, but as she matured, so did her ambitions. She dreamed of possibilities like becoming a doctor or a lawyer, and community outreach found its way into her future goals too, partially because of her father’s involvement as a Democratic precinct captain (someone who went door-to-door making sure constituents were registered to vote, answering questions about the candidates, the political process, and more), and partially because Michelle knew she wanted to do work that helped people. Her parents encouraged their daughter to continue to dream and made sure she had every opportunity they could afford. And even a few they couldn’t.

As Michelle grew older, she noticed changes in and around her neighborhood because of redlining, which is a discriminatory practice that was popular during the 1960s and 1970s to keep cities segregated. Her elementary school had been large, crowded, and almost exclusively Black, but Chicago as a whole was beginning to take small steps toward integration. And as she traveled in and out of her neighborhood, for school and extracurricular involvement, Michelle had to learn how to straddle two worlds: the one where she was a girl from the South Side, and the one where she was a girl who wanted more.

This led to Michelle questioning her identity—she wanted to be genuinely herself, unashamed of where she came from, while also not hiding her desire for success. And it wasn’t always easy straddling that line.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.